The Action Site to Stop Cassini Earth Flyby
P.O. Box 1999, Wendell Depot, MA 01380 (978)544-7862 info@flybynews.com
1. Sample letter to Dr. Daniel S. Goldin, NASA Director, to omit the Cassini Earth Flyby
2. Earl Budin's Report "Why the Cassini Flyby Must Be Omitted"
3. Nuclear Powered Space Missions - Past and Future
Extracts by Regina Hagen, edited by Dr. Martin Kalinowski - from IANUS Working Paper
4. Crazy Nuke Propaganda
An article from the Arizona Daily Star (Tucson), October 18, 1998: "For Our children, we must consider the use of nuclear energy," by Bertram Wolfe, a past president of the American Nuclear Society and a retired vice president of General Electric, where he ran the nuclear energy business.
Hi, passing this amazing twisting of reality to you. I always wondered about if it was greed alone that made the nuke industry so damaging, or did the greed and insecurity cause them to brainwash themselves. The following article seems to favor the argument that the author is sincere and brainwashed. Perhaps I will send a copy of this newsletter to Dan Goldin to try to receive his response on the points of this article. Pretty amazing!
Date: Mon, 19 Oct 1998 11:27:36 -0400
From: ASlater <aslater@gracelinks.org>
Sender: owner-abolition-caucus@igc.org
Subject: Fwd: NUKE-WASTE: Bert Wolfe Says...
To: abolition-caucus@igc.apc.org, ana-bananas@igc.apc.org, star@igc.org
Friends,
The reprehensible "article" below by the past president of the American Nuclear Society[pro-nuke industry leader] and retired vice-president of General Electric needs a response from all of us. The "article" appeared in the San Joe Mercury News who can be called at: Phone:408-920-5000, Fax:408-288-8060
Knight-Ridder/Tribune Information Services distributed the article. Knight
-Ridder can be reached at: Phone:202-383-6080, Fax:202-393-2460
Date: Sun, 18 Oct 1998 19:49:53 -0400
Subject: NUKE-WASTE: Bert Wolfe Says...
To: NUKE-WASTE@igc.apc.org
From: birnie@gci-net.com (birnie@gci-net.com)
An article from the Arizona Daily Star (Tucson), October 18, 1998:
For Our children, we must consider the use of nuclear energy
by Bertram Wolfe
Nuclear energy may be vital to the future welfare of our nation and the world. But we nuclear technologists have failed to speak out about its benefits, allowing the media and the public to be misled by anti-nuclear organizations. As a result, our children and grandchildren face unnecessary, perhaps disastrous hardships. Peaceful nuclear energy began in 1954 with President Eisenhower's "Atoms for Peace" program. As nuclear weapons technology was spreading unchecked, "Atoms for Peace" was intended to induce nations to abandon weapons development in return for the transfer of peaceful nuclear technology. Despite nuclear tests in India and Pakistan this year, President Eisenhower must be looking down with pride, considering how limited the spread of nuclear weapons has been in the past 40 years, and how rare their use.
The key element in American development of nuclear energy has been public safety. Some 20 years ago, a Russian delegation visited General Electric's nuclear enterprise, where I worked. They felt the added costs of United States nuclear plants - because of safety features - were unnecessary. Chernobyl proved them wrong. Such a reactor could not have been built or operated in the United States.
Even the difficult Three Mile Island nuclear accident was, in a sense, a success for American policy. No one at the plant was hurt, and people outside the plant's fence got less radiation than if they had spent a two-week vacation in Denver - where naturally occurring nuclear radiation is higher than in most of the U.S. Worldwide, not one person has been harmed by operation of nuclear plants built to United States standards.
In fact, nuclear power is saving lives by reducing fossil fuel use. In the United States alone, it is estimated that tens of thousands of premature deaths occur yearly because people are breathing small particles emitted by the burning of fossil fuels.
A second advantage of nuclear energy is the small amount of waste it produces, easily contained compared with waste produced by fossil fuels. A hundred thousand times less solid waste than a coal plant, one can afford a very high cost per cubic foot to manage the wastes safely.
Disposal of nuclear waste is routinely protested, yet it has caused no harm. Technical evaluations have shown the centralized low-level waste repository proposed for Ward Valley, approved by the state of California, technical but political, initiated by anti-nuclear groups who tell the public there is no way to get rid of the wastes.
Fossil fuels, despite drawbacks, have improved living conditions. Nuclear energy can further improve the world's welfare while reducing problems and risks. It is the only available, widely practical means for substantially mitigating the threat of global warming, a projected side effect of burning fossil fuels.
Nuclear power can provide an essentially unlimited supply of energy to meet increasing world needs and replace the fossil fuels we are depleting. It can let us avoid international hostilities over scarce supplies. It might one day let us bring our troops home from Saudi Arabia.
But power plants are not the only application of nuclear technology. A million lifesaving nuclear medical procedures are performed each month in reused to diagnose various disorders. Irradiation eliminates dangerous bacteria from food supplies. Industries use radiation to detect defective equipment and to make smoke detectors.
Still, the no-nukes crowd has succeeded in making the public frightened of any kind of nuclear radiation. Decades of research show clearly that low levels of radiation, up to a hundred times natural background radiation, are not to be feared.
Indeed, low levels of radiation, like low levels of sunlight, may be healthy - although high levels of either can cause cancers. People in Denver, and Japanese who received low levels of radiation from World War II atom bombs, are living longer than comparable groups exposed to less radiation. University of Pittsburgh Professor Bernard Cohen, who studied hundreds of thousands of people, concluded that those living in areas with the highest concentrations of radioactive radon live longer than people elsewhere. After completing his study in 1995, he turned off his home's ventilation system - which was intended to reduce radon concentrations.
The nuclear paranoia can have devastating effects. At Chernobyl, fewer than 40 deaths were caused directly by nuclear radiation. But the International Atomic Energy Agency estimates more than 100,000 deaths in Europe resulted from abortions by women who were afraid of the effects of the spreading radiation from the accident. It was an unnecessary catastrophe: Actually, the radiation in Europe from Chernobyl was less than normal background.
The United States Energy Information Agency projects that if current patterns prevail, the nuclear plants that today provide 20 percent of America's electricity will be shut down as their licenses expire. Bureaucratic licensing procedures and court cases mean building a nuclear plant here takes a dozen or more years and exorbitant costs. There are no plans for new ones.
A member of the Nuclear Commission of South Korea, which is expanding its nuclear energy capacity, predicts that soon Uncle Sam - the nuclear "godfather" - will have to rely on his "grandchildren" for nuclear energy technology. If so, we will lose our key influence on international safety and non-proliferation issues.
As a nuclear pioneer I am proud of the development of peaceful nuclear power in the United States. It is reliable, practical, safe and clean, and our leadership has resulted in reactor safety and nuclear weapons limitations worldwide.
But I am anguished that we nuclear technologists, and the media, are failing the American public. We have let the anti-nuclear, anti-energy, anti-industrial groups frighten the public and dominate the debate, impeding nuclear energy progress in the United States. As a result, our children and grandchildren may suffer devastating environmental effects and world energy shortages.
It is not too late to reclaim the debate and to change our direction on nuclear energy. We owe it to future generations.
From the Noflyby coordinators:
- our unofficial physicist advisor for NoFlyby, Dr. Kai Petzke's response.
It's a breath of fresh air of intelligence and reason.
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